New York Daily News reporter Ben Smith acquired a carelessly safeguarded copy of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign strategy.
It’s clearly laid out in 140 pages of printed text, handwriting and spreadsheets: The top-secret plan for Rudy Giuliani’s bid for the White House. The remarkably detailed dossier sets out the budgets, schedules and fund-raising plans that will underpin the former New York mayor’s presidential campaign – as well as his aides’ worries that personal and political baggage could scuttle his run. At the center of his efforts: a massive fund-raising push to bring in at least $100 million this year, with a scramble for at least $25 million in the next three months alone.
The loss of the battle plan is a remarkable breach in the high-stakes game of presidential politics and a potentially disastrous blunder for Giuliani in the early stages of his campaign. The document was obtained by the Daily News from a source sympathetic to one of Giuliani’s rivals for the White House. The source said it was left behind in one of the cities Giuliani visited as he campaigned for dozens of Republican candidates in the weeks leading up to the November 2006 elections.
Giuliani spokeswoman Sunny Mindel suggested there were political dirty tricks behind the loss of the documents and called the timing suspicious. “I wonder why such suspicious activity is occurring and can only guess it is because of Rudy’s poll numbers in New Hampshire and Iowa,” Mindel said.
Giuliani leads most public opinion polls of Republican primary voters though he has not announced his candidacy for President. But the dossier, which envisions spending more than $21 million this year alone, shows that Giuliani began meeting with potential supporters last April and that by October, his staff had put in place a detailed plan for a serious bid for the presidency. But they also depict a candidate torn between his prosperous business and a political future full of both promise and risk.
One page cites the explicit concern that he might “drop out of [the] race” as a consequence of his potentially “insurmountable” personal and political vulnerabilities. On the same page is a list of the candidate’s central problems in bullet-point form: his private sector business; disgraced former aide Bernard Kerik; his third wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; “social issues,” on which is he is more liberal than most Republicans, and his former wife Donna Hanover.
Aside from listing the people Giuliani plans to target to handle key organizational roles–which gives a heads up to rivals and creates potential embarrassment if he is unsuccessful at bringing them on board–this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. That those bullet points are key vulnerabilities is common knowledge, as is the need to raise oodles of money. Still, if your chief selling point is executive competence, such stumbles aren’t good.
via Taegan Goddard
